


the great gig in the sky

by openended



Category: Battlestar Galactica (2003)
Genre: Gen, Resurrection
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-02-15
Updated: 2012-02-15
Packaged: 2017-10-31 04:57:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 600
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/340171
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/openended/pseuds/openended
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Can someone who doesn't know if she's alive ever die?</p>
            </blockquote>





	the great gig in the sky

**Author's Note:**

> For the A Softer World fic meme, prompt: _Battlestar Galactica, Six, "Nobody dies before their time. / That's what 'their time' means."_

She opens her mouth to breathe, desperate for air, and chokes on the sweet liquid in the bath. The water fills her mouth and nose and for a moment – she thinks she’s dying.

Again.

And then hands plunge into the bath and encourage her upwards, cupping her shoulders and elbows, lifting her upper body from the tub to breathe air instead of water. She coughs violently and her throat and lungs burn as the others soothingly brush her hair out of her eyes. Someone gently rubs a towel over her face and a voice asks her how she feels.

She blinks and the room comes into focus, all streamlined silver and black, red lights pulsing the heartbeat of the ship. Coded symbols flicker down an invisible curtain behind the others, and her memory engages.

A trio of faces, of bodies, of models, of friends, sits near the tub, awaiting her response.

Two.  
_(Leoben)_

Four.  
_(Simon)_

Eight.  
_(Sharon)  
(Boomer Sharon, the Sharon that followed the plan; Eights cannot be trusted)_

“Alive,” she says. It is the expected answer. To say anything else would indicate a glitch in this model’s programming, despite _alive_ being one of their greatest questions.

Though these eyes have never seen anyone but the three people kneeling beside the tub, this brain knows that five others are missing.

One.  
_(Cavil)_

Three.  
_(D’Anna)  
(no; D’Anna is boxed, permanently relegated to cold storage, programming irrevocably damaged; this body will never set eyes on a Three though its brain knows what a Three looks like; it remembers Three’s friendship)_

Five.  
_(Doral)_

Six.  
_(Six…Six…Six doesn’t have a name; Six is me, I am Six)_

Seven.  
_(Daniel)  
(faulty from the beginning, boxed for years; countless – no, not countless, twenty-three – regenerations of Six have occurred since Seven-Daniel was boxed and yet this brain can still remember the feel of his hand on hers, warm and comforting)_

She pulls her hand from Eight’s and shivers, naked and wet and cold in the metallic ship, wanting to go back under where it’s warm and weightless, where memories have not yet been recalled to the surface.

“How did you die?” 

She’s answered this question before. _Explosion, suicide bomber, radiation, gunshot, drowning, car accident._ The answers are as varied as the deaths themselves. Some predicted, some not. All ending in her gasping for air in this tub, choking on the liquid covering her body, shocked at the feeling of being alive when only moments before she was dead.

If she was ever alive. If they can ever be alive. 

If something that doesn’t know if it’s alive can ever die.

She looks at Four and says, “Damaged basestar,” because that is how her previous body was destroyed.

“This has all happened before,” Two mutters, his mantra grating on her new spine the same way it grated on her old spine, “and this will all happen again.”

She accepts Eight’s help from the tub, balancing on shaky legs that remember how to stand but have never stood before, and wonders.

Wonders if (when) she’ll die; if permanence is possible or if this cycle of maybe-death and resurrection will continue for eternity like Two’s words. If she’ll know, in the instant before consciousness disappears, that this death is final.

She keeps her thoughts to herself. If she speaks them aloud, One will hear of it –

Eight looks like she might ask after her thoughts, confusion and curiosity spread plainly across her face, but she shakes her head.

“Remembering how to walk,” she smiles.

_(Eights cannot be trusted)_

– and then she’ll never know the answers to her own questions.


End file.
